Roberts himself was never as angry as John Hagee; he never led the cultural right in the same way as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Yet he was just as conservative — and equally famous, especially after declaring in 1988 that God would “call him home” unless viewers donated $8 million to his educational foundation.
At that point, Roberts had been asking viewers to donate money in return for prayer for decades. God, Roberts promised, would reward the donors with material prosperity. He called this “seed faith,” and it certainly seeded something. As Roberts was building his eponymously-named diploma mill, his form of tithing grew more popular in the charismatic movement. By the 1990′s it had bloomed into the prosperity gospel, with tens of millions of adherents.
Besides the theological problems posed by the prosperity gospel, there are the rational implications of superior piety rewarded by material abundance. As someone on WikiPedia has put it so well,
It implies both that people who are favored by God will be materially successful, and also that materially successful people are successful because God favored them. (Emphasis mine)
Surprisingly, this idea of wealth as a sign of divine approval resonated with Objectivism, the latter-day cult based on the science fiction rantings of atheist and sociopath Ayn Rand (real name Alisa Rosenbaum). The resulting mutant offspring are Michelle Malkin, Andrew Breitbart, and other major culture warriors of the wingnutosphere.
Roberts probably never saw, and certainly never addressed, the mating of Objectivism and the prosperity gospel. He was retired in the final decade of his life as the two dissonant gospels of selfishness mixed in cyberspace. Nor did he initiate or encourage the pairing; Randists and gospel believers met through the auspices of Koch Industries, arch-funder of Kulturkampf organizations. Challenged, Roberts might have disowned the Randists.
Yet we must recognize him as the grandfather of a pernicious right-wing meme that contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. Prosperity gospel lies at the heart of deregulation ideology; its blatant disregard of empiricism, like so much else in the wacky world of the right, is a dangerous delusion of faith-based politics. Roberts may never have wanted to be a culture warrior, but Kulturkampf is his legacy.
